Showed Up: Sam Mendes Does 'The Tempest' and 'As You Like It' at BAM @12:45 PM
The second of three seasons of The Bridge Project, a partnership of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic and Neal Street, is closing at BAM this week. Last year, Sam Mendes staged The Winter’s Tale and The Cherry Orchard here; this year it’s The Tempest and As You Like It. Two of those plays are romances, involving love but also magic, sadness, and personal redemption. One, written as a comedy, is regularly performed as a tragedy, which means that audiences see it as a little of both. As You Like It is a straightforward comedy, but here Mendes has added a torture scene, which isn’t very funny. READ MORE 5
Difficult Listening Hour, with Seth Colter Walls: I Let You Touch Me Every Now And Then: Last Chance for Isabelle Huppert in 'Quartett' at BAM; First Chance for Annie's 'My Love is Better' @3:15 PM
Coming up as a cinema snob in adolescence, your average hetero boy's sexual desire—the hyper-wattage of which tends to outstrip FCC broadcast regulations, thereby causing a lot of, um, fritz on the signal—is thankfully managed by a chronological succession of fantastic Parisian lips. Anna Karina (in early Godard), Deneuve (in everything), and then: bam. The modern era. It belongs to Isabelle Huppert. Forget Courtney Cox's insulting Cougartown weaksauce. It's enough to make you believe in a God, the way Huppert gets more dangerous—and more unbearably desirable—with every passing year. You thought she was peaking as a labial cutter in Michel Haneke's film adaptation of Jelenik's The Piano Teacher back in 2001? That was dumb of you. Naturally, Huppert upped the erotic ante by signing on for a film adaptation of a Georges Bataille incest tale, Ma Mere. READ MORE 7
Showed Up, with Seth Colter Walls: Robert Lepage's "Lipsynch" at BAM @1:55 PM
Late one evening last week, while seated on the Wall Street 2/3 subway platform, a 30-something Caucasian woman in glasses and sweatpants interrupted my reading of Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes.
"Excuse me," she said. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Surely," I replied, probably a little over-happy because my life is plainly more enjoyable than Bill Clinton's was when he was president.
"Oh," the woman said, stopping herself. "Are you a New Yorker?"
"Yes," I replied. "Why do you ask?"
"Because your hair is neat and you said 'surely.'"
"Oh. Well, yes, I live in New York. But that wasn't your original question. What's up?" I said, eager to move this subway conversation along.
